Book Image

Mastering Object-Oriented Python - Second Edition

By : Steven F. Lott
Book Image

Mastering Object-Oriented Python - Second Edition

By: Steven F. Lott

Overview of this book

Object-oriented programming (OOP) is a relatively complex discipline to master, and it can be difficult to see how general principles apply to each language's unique features. With the help of the latest edition of Mastering Objected-Oriented Python, you'll be shown how to effectively implement OOP in Python, and even explore Python 3.x. Complete with practical examples, the book guides you through the advanced concepts of OOP in Python, and demonstrates how you can apply them to solve complex problems in OOP. You will learn how to create high-quality Python programs by exploring design alternatives and determining which design offers the best performance. Next, you'll work through special methods for handling simple object conversions and also learn about hashing and comparison of objects. As you cover later chapters, you'll discover how essential it is to locate the best algorithms and optimal data structures for developing robust solutions to programming problems with minimal computer processing. Finally, the book will assist you in leveraging various Python features by implementing object-oriented designs in your programs. By the end of this book, you will have learned a number of alternate approaches with different attributes to confidently solve programming problems in Python.
Table of Contents (25 chapters)
Free Chapter
1
Section 1: Tighter Integration Via Special Methods
11
Section 2: Object Serialization and Persistence
17
Section 3: Object-Oriented Testing and Debugging

Using pydoc for documentation

We use the library module, pydoc, to produce HTML documentation from Python code. It turns out that we're using it when we evaluate help() in interactive Python. This function produces the text mode documentation with no markup.

When we use pydoc to produce the documentation, we'll use it in one of the following ways:

  • Prepare text-mode documentation files and view them with command-line tools such as more or less.
  • Run an HTTP server and browse the documentation directly.

We can run the following command-line tool to prepare the text-based documentation for a module:

pydoc somemodule 

We can also use the following code:

python3 -m pydoc somemodule 

Either command will create text documentation based on the Python code. The output will be displayed with programs such as less (on Linux or macOS) or more (on Windows), which paginate the long...